Tracing a Subtle Feedback

Painting as a Language of Participation

A reflection on painting reexamines the process of observation as an active form of personal–as well as social–interaction. This account is supported by theories on perception, Art Therapy, and raises an inquiry on the categorical distinctions between ‘symbolic’ dialogue and ‘actual’ Socially Engaged Practice.

 

Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.

–Philip Guston

Having perceived how small, indifferent signals seem to fit together into significantly charged symbols, I constantly find myself recognizing how far beyond our rational grasp lies the system that meets them. For at least a century, Surrealists have been putting accidents and indeterminacy to a formative use, channeling into a ‘universal order beyond any construct posited by Western casual and logical thought’ (Watts, 1980, p. 4.) Although they made imanifest some of their methods, the process by which I’ve found myself tuning in while painting has proven difficult to identify and practice sustainably. This text follows an effort to locate the relevant parameters leading to the outcomes made recently as a way of mapping the system, or identifying who, if anyone, is responsible for causing it in some way. Identifying the methods and materials already illustrates a lot of the personal, even the social significance carried by every work. 

Since May this year, I’ve worked on the last two (2) out of six (6) medium format, framed, primed–and sanded–MDF panels I brought with me from home. All boards are different sized and all frames were made by a carpenter with whom I shared a studio years ago. I also brought with me a 450 x 150 cm, thick, cotton-duck canvas; my grandmother saw a very neat hem around it, and it was later prepared superficially with a Viennese red distemper by a fellow artist and I. It was meant to depict a landscape for us to use as a backdrop. For some time it hung from six (6) large brass eyelets on the wall of my studio, looking like an impossibly massive piece of leather. I folded and brought that with me as well. 

I also painted on five (5) canvases I bought, coated–with PVA, worked on, and stretched, and on two (2) small format paintings which had been covered with unevenly applied black acrylic offered by M, artist and my host, upon my arrival at a seven (7) week artist residency in Tbilisi. All the works were painted with oils, only two (2) of them haven’t yet been exhibited, one (1) of them is still in process, three (3) have been sold. Another (1) might still be worked on someday. For only two (2) out of the ten (10) regarded paintings did I have an image as a starting reference. I applied colors in a specific consistency against a specific surface without a preconceived idea of what form to depict or even where to apply them, leading me to unpredictable instance–or problem–that required that I solve differently according to what I noticed happening, sometimes figures emerging eventually.

All the smaller formats–the MDF boards and M’s black canvases–were made in numbers of attempts by which I cover the whole surface with a homogenous coat of fresh paint, some of them becoming resolved during the first one ‘Alla prima’. All of the mentioned properties of each object encompass the chosen parameters, both material and symbolic, with which I decided to work with consciously and unconsciously to a certain degree. By remembering the physical parameters, I’ve identified in hindsight how underlying symbolic properties determined the exercise of painting as well. 

Moreover, during sustained periods of intense embodied involvement, I was allowed to notice patterns of signs which were feeding back and forward with symbols emerging spontaneously; that is, with no conscious intention whatsoever, onto the paintings. Like whispering, these symbols reflected something back to me, like feeding relevant information trying to bypass the cloud of thought and learned tendencies. Reflecting on them in hindsight helps in identifying paintings as charged mediators of the surrounding observers’ situation. I will hope to trace some of the most significant signals embodying meaning in an effort to expose a network made visible around painting as a process of transcendental observation. Engaging with perception, art therapy, and the school of socially engaged practice has lent a language and a method for the desired purpose.

As an undergrad, ten years ago, I attended a panel discussion with Luis Camnitzer, a leading Argentinian figure in conceptual art and art education. While answering questions he declared that ‘if you make a small landscape, hang it at the art fair and sell it, you won’t be impacting society in any way whatsoever.’ I’ve been led to consider an essentially social role in the origin, tracing, retracing, stylizing, and interpreting images. More recently, my practice as a teacher, painter, and specific references made me acknowledge how a variety of cultural manifestations are recreated according to our individual experience of the according to our individual history and our specific circumstances over time (Rancière, 2009.) Consequently, I began considering the role of the spectator in the construction of meaning and the malleable nature images.

In ‘Education for Socially Engaged Art; A Materials and Techniques Handbook’ by Pablo Helguera follow’s Camitzer’s footsteps in my passionately arbitrary timeline (he is acknowledged). He mentions the ‘community of narrators and translators’ who project their own personal experience onto the artwork that Jaques Rancière celebrates in ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ (Rancière, 2009). Even then, Helguera categorically separates his ‘actual’ practice from that of the ‘visual arts’, categorically labeling their reach as ‘nominal’, ‘symbolic’, and ‘passive’, ‘hypothetical’, and ‘indirect’ as though it meant the opposite to ‘effectiveness’ (Helguera, 1991.) He largely defines his practice by comparing it to what it isn’t in an effort to develop the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ technical manual’ that [can] guide practitioners in understanding the elements of their practice and achieving the results they want’ in the same way it’s been made available to painters, printmakers, and photographers’ (Helguera, 1991, p. x.)

However divergent from my views, Helguera’s definitions made me question the need to gather the parameters of painting as though to expect ‘achieving results’ in such a process. How should I enunciate a formless, indeterminate process which is essentially based on abandoning expectations and the illusion of control as a starting premise? Unable to define the process of painting as a method with a set of instructions to follow, for example, the steps for making a picture with a maritime scenery, I’ve opted for describing the events that first came to mind as a way to trace the embodied language, which is when the body knows how to act, and is where personal meaning derives from.

Around 1982, the Portuguese artist Paula Rego (1935-2022) painted a series of large works where she ‘engaged with her childhood passion of painting as play’ (Willing) where, says Michael Ajerman, she ‘sinks her teeth’ on the works’: ‘There wasn’t any clear narrative–and everything seemed to basically fly all over the page and kinda find itself the way that it develops along the way’ (Ajerman, 2024.) In his regard, Ajerman refers to the pictorial act as a physical, perhaps mechanical and at the same time almost feral or at least instinctive action when relating to a process which ‘appears’ to have developed organically, spontaneously by itself as if they had a life of their own. These flat, intense compositions took some time before they started working through me on an irrational, emotional level. 

Amongst the chaotic compositions filled with forms that seem to sprout out from and become squashed between ambiguous fields of flat pastel and off-white colors, one starts to identify poor figures seemingly participating in a kind of infernal garden of earthly passions and vices. The son of the artist, Nick Willing, said ‘these paintings, perhaps more than any others, helped to understand herself and those closer to her’ (Willing), like the paintings themselves reflected back to her an otherwise intangibly heavy burden being carried unconsciously until ‘biting’ through them. Also, Willing’s comment points to the idea of the act of painting as a curative experience which led to a form of understanding–perhaps even a form of catharsis–by which she might’ve reconciled with her position in relation to herself and the people around her. Confronted with the need to situate this non-verbal, embodied, intuitive process, I started thinking about the significance of meaning.

A fortunate number of experiences, references, and interactions have struck the feeling like we’ve grown accustomed to regard reason more highly than emotion. As a way of confronting that, I regard meaning as something which holds perhaps an inexplicable value, rather than something to be ‘understood’. In his radio essays in 1948, Merleau–Ponty argues how Decartes guided generations towards a circling trap by following the extreme of reason. Accepting the ‘tutelage’ of perception’, on the contrary Merleau-Ponty gathers’ it is impossible to separate meaning from their way of appearing,’ and so he argues that the essence of an object of interest involves a closely entwined interaction between the way in which his object of interest performs its function and our experience of the object’s accidental properties’ (Merleau–Ponty, 1948, p. 94). In my understanding, Merleau–Ponty would appeal to describe–instead of defining–the thread of signs that led to the experienced meaning as a spontaneous one.

Although popularly discussed in perception theory, for some time I’ve regarded ‘embodied knowledge’ a difficult experience to put into words, even using a theorist’s. How might one argue that a specially meaningful process can start out without an image and happens automatically, or unintentionally as mentioned earlier? During my course I’ve unsuccessfully stressed how painting really occurs in a form of contradiction; once we become absent. As I pulled out Helguera’s Handbook from the shelf, another, blue book followed behind On Art and Therapy; An Exploration, by Martina Thompson. It started like this: ‘How we come to approach our work is often a matter of chance’ (Thompson, 1989, p. 1.) 

In her exploration, she is compelled to tell her story as an Art Therapist and a painter and carefully regards a historical perspective. In her analysis of the creative process, her acknowledgement of Anton Ehrenzweig’s second phase on The Hidden Order of Art felt the clearest and closest of all. ‘It is the ‘integration of the material [unconscious parts] in the picture by means of Dedifferentiation–defined as a receptive watchfulness, a dispersed attention, the use of the primary process as a precision instrument for unconscious scanning, a holding before the inner eye a multitude of possible choices’–until a hidden order becomes apparent’. (Thompson, 1989, p. 63.) Like Ehrenzweig, Thompson includes a an array of references who have put into words the almost untraceable instants of such a process: ‘Deleuze sought to defend the truth of painting on the grounds of its immediate, and hence unmanipulable, corporeality’ (Thompson, 1989, p. 86.)

With regards to the effects of such a practice, Thompson noted her mentor E.M Lyddiatt on Jung’s approach regarding experience as the most important thing in ‘getting a valuable feeling out from the unconscious towards a restorative attitude into being’ (Thompson, 1986, 17). By engaging with Active Imagination, experience ‘allows fantasy to take shape’ (Thompson, 1986, 16-20). Although Jung ‘categorically’ believes that such curative practice requires an essential form of ‘integration’, and ‘moral assimilation’ I would like to make the case that, similarly to many other practices, rituals and exercises, the social very practice of painting with others, as well as with oneself involves a process which leaves all the necessary evidence needed in order to transcend beyond learned tendencies.

It’s curious to find that the restoration taking place in the creative experience is deeply rooted in a kind of raw material which is stored within. From what I seem to understand through this first approach of reflection, this formless build up of raw material gathers a emotional baggage of experiences which are accumulated and silently manifested through the aching social experience with ourselves and others until it can be fully and directly witnessed by traces through which the symbolic becomes material and with it visible. 

Following Ajerman’s observations of Rego’s method while painting her large early 80’s works, he mentions Rego’s cautionary interpretation of a specific accident while visiting Henry Darger’s apartment and the place where he used to life, paint and the actual resting place of his thirteen-volume (13) work. Having found an inspiring dialogue with the sinister atmosphere in The Vivian Girls work, ‘somehow, at the door, it slammed on Paula’s arm, on her hand, and really injured her, and she took that to be a sign basically saying that her version of the series was now over’ (Ajerman, 2024). Identifying how Rego decided to stop working on her version Darger’s work as a response to ‘forces’ outside of herself ‘basically telling her what to do and what not to do’ suggests a further reflection by which I would like to discuss the systems operating within us beyond our embodied individual selves. 

One of Praula Rego’s  versions of The Vivian Girls at Victoria Miro Gallery

Following the thread of what my recent practice entails, I would like to introduce how the willingness to depart from a chosen route of action as a form of responding to internal, as well as external signals eventually leads towards personal transformation around painting. The following personal account is an edit of the press release which welcomed visitors along with an offering of traditional food and wine into my final exhibition at the end of my artist residency in Georgia.

Dark Night

Tbilisi 13/09/24 (Edit)

It’s hot, and I’ve been falling asleep later and later. The sounds of raucous Ninja Kawasaki bikes and customized race cars speeding up Pekini Avenue and down Merab Kostava Street surround me in the eighth floor of the soviet compound at 20 Tina losebidze Street. It feels familiar to say ‘I tried sleeping through it’ on my studio bed, the couch, on the floor, and then over the NIKE yoga mat I decided to buy at TOPSPORT around the corner. You’ll be constantly rattled out of ease until almost morning, when the sun’s suddenly high up again and it gets too busy with traffic for so many people to speed like that. But then the heat prevents you from crashing anywhere, even after a restless night. ‘They’re keeping me awake on purpose’ was a circling, delirious thought. I refused to take action beyond laying, in a tense build up of tolerance, shutting myself in, waiting for wifi and ease while sliding my phone and contemplating illusions of vaguely comforting alternatives: ‘This is already halfway to Nepal;’ ‘Someone said something about flying directly to Thailand from here;’ ‘There’s even enough time to even go home before getting back to London.’

“Without the bold daring to part with his own identity, a human, as well as a city, is doomed to repeat the same experience in terms of its spaciality. The risk of giving up identity, the risk of change with an uncertain outcome, is a precondition of freedom. A cosmopolis creates spaces for human beings to transcend their own limits, to fulfill or realize themselves, albeit without guaranteeing the success of this undertaking.

I watched time drag away for weeks. I spent time laying, just bearing through it, like an illness. A song that someone had recently played on the jukebox at a bar where I was later kicked out from stayed with me: “This is not what you wanted. Oh. Not what you had in mind”. I had then tried talking to a stranger. 

– ‘Hi!’ 

–‘It’s not necessary…’ someone else replied a couple of times before pushing me into ‘understanding.’

 –‘Now you understand?!’ The bar door had a small sign next to it which proclaimed ‘WE DO NOT TOLERATE HATE IN THIS PLACE,’ meanwhile bouncers proceeded to pat my whole body looking for drugs on me and demanded that I face one of many cameras before pulling me from my shirt and out of the dancefloor.

‘All these racers’ deliberately making me restless’ echoed in my brain while I sat on the balcony and contemplated the decisions that got me there without reflection. One day G texted as he came down to the city from the mountains, where we had gathered some days earlier during the ritual. I met him and his villager friend S down at the parking lot and together walked somewhere for a late Sunday breakfast. We found a nice restaurant under the playful shadows of yellow leaves blowing on the trees across the park. Then I felt the first sting of a distant and familiar feeling piercing through the numbness of my ongoing refuge. At night they visited and helped prepare a Greek salad for dinner, and asked to join them for a ride on their rental. I offered a bottle of K’s Kisi, played Joropo del Llano, and went out confronting the noise that had had my mind circling, and my body stagnant. Suddenly I’m riding shotgun on a fast, thundering car, my companions blasting a Georgian song of lament (Gogitidze, 2020):

A cool breeze blew in and out the windows and my withered self felt stretching out,  collecting itself, catching up with my exhausted mind. Their company was so contagious even the police seemed hooked on to the vibe as we all rooted together for G blowing on the roadside breath test until getting us a successful negative probe –‘More!’, ‘More!’, ‘More!’, ‘More!’, ‘More!’ 

Detail of Handshake. Colors seen glowing in between the aoutline of the central figure.

We arrived at Turtle Lake and hiked in the dark up the hill on the dried mud path. At the top, S gathered wild berries from a tree which resembled another familiar figure that I had also recently recalled while tracing my shadows’ outlines as they projected onto the canvas. We ate the fruit and watched the city glowing bright out from the bottom of the dark valley. On our way back, while crossing the river towards the studio, G mentioned the four lions standing on the plinths at the corners of the bridge. The photo I took of one of them linked my first and last paintings made unknowingly.  I had first crossed the bridge on a hot day when M welcomed me with a tour on my first day. 

 

‘S’ and ‘G’ gathering berries on top of the hill.

 

Tracing of projected outline onto the canvass at the studio in Tbilisi.

Elene posing with Handashake, during private view. Exhibited in Dark Night at project space, in Fabrika. Tbilisi

The first painting I made in the studio started with the simple intention of remembering a cloud I’d seen one morning in the mountains. Almost immediately after making the first, dangerously quick marks on the linen, I saw an eyebrow. Before realizing it, I had outlined a portrait of a bearded man in torment. Although many see only a smaller, different face in the painting, I remembered Laocoon’s expression and features. When I sent my mother a photo of it, she saw a lion. One day before the show, I painted the outline of one of the bridge’s Lions. Thinking of how to paint the features of the Tbilisian symbol in so little time, I noticed I had already done so on my first painting. 

 

Lion standing on plinth at Kura river, Tbilisi.

 

Installation view of Stamina at exhibited in Dark Night at project space, in Fabrika. Tbilisi

G and S’s visit reminds me, like Martina Thompson says, of what being seen affords (Thompson, 1989, p. 42.) ‘It seems that people who are not seen may well be denied a subjective feeling of reality. (Thompson, 1989, p. 43) By the time of their intervention, I was becoming significantly incapacitated by a learned tendency to take refuge by inaction. It built up into a dam of tensions which cascaded out in interactions which allied for mental emancipation in the interactions that I experienced in painting parallel to my social life. As much as I was becoming recognized by others after a period of isolation, I also began to recognize a similar dialogue with myself, perhaps a healing correspondence between parts of me catching up with other more exhausted parts into a more present self. Instead of tolerating the hellish day into the restless nights, emerging symbols in paintings began signaling growing coincidences that became more evident, and more explicitly significant in surrounding occurrences.

Following Huxley’s method, I recently opened Taussig’s book on Terror and Healing at random and found a quote from Walter Benjamin: ‘Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. […] In this structure he [the ‘historic materialist’, or critic] recognizes the sign of a messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. (Taussig, 1986, 200)

Relating to Benjamin’s matured view on the role of the critic’s role when engaging with the ‘dialectical image’, Taussig mentions the intrinsic value that fluid images such as Our Lady Remedies, in Santiago de Cali, have on the daily, as well as the mystical life. The coined ‘monad’, which has been heavily discussed in philosophy and theology, seems like a formless unit which somehow shapes the curse of our reality. Gathering how the artwork holds the undifferentiated experience between myself and others as a fluid anchor of the many participants building meaning through it, I wonder if painting isn’t the expression of such a remarkably complex event.

 

Bibliography

Ajerman, M. Broomsticks and Bedknobs, A Talk on Paula Rego. In: Painter’s Forum, Meeting with Geraint Evans. 15.11.2024.  MA Talk. Recording on Microsoft Teams. Camberwell College of Art: London.

Bronzer, G. (2013) Bad Kingdom. Moderat. Monkeytown Records.

Gogitidze, M. (2020). Vici Daggale (Single) Lyrics Translate. (29.03.2024) Translation by Sumonishvili, S. Available at: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/vitsi-dagghale-i-know-i-have-tired-you-out.html#songtranslation. (Accessed on 13.11.2024.)

Helguera, P. (2011) Education for Socially Engaged Art; A Materials and Techniques Handbook. New York: Jorge Pinto Books.

Huxley, A. (1954) The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. London; Vintage.

Merleau—Ponty, M. (1948) “Art and The World of Perception.” The World of Perception. London: Routledge Classics, 2008.

Paula Rego: Letting Loose. [Exhibition]. London: Victoria Miro Gallery. 22 September 2023 – 11 November, 2023.

Philip Guston. [Exhibition]. London: Tate Modern. 05 October 2023 – 24 February, 2024.

Rancière, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator. London; Verso. 

Taussig, M.T. (1986) Shamanism, Colonialism, A Study in Terror and Healing and The Wild Man. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Thompson, M. (1989) On Art and Therapy; An Exploration. London: Virago Press.

Watts, M.A. (1980) Chance: A Perspective on Dada. University of Iowa: UMI Research Press. University Studies in Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde, No. 9.